An Intelligent Mobile News Reader for the Visually Impaired People

In order to access the Web news, visually impaired people have to resort to some types of screen readers to convert the textual information into audio streams. Such special users have to listen to the information line by line. It is particularly inefficient with a mobile device to search and navigate interested information in Web news-sphere in which the content structure is complicated and the connection of relevant news is loose. The challenge lies in the complex digital information organization and limited accessibility in mobile devices including small UI, limited processing power and so forth. In this article, we propose an intelligent information-processing paradigm to transform the complex news information for easy mobile accessibility. This is achieved by summarizing content, and recommending relevant information. Our experimental evaluation with the participation of the visually impaired users shows that this mechanism reduces the navigational overhead significantly and enables the visually impaired users to access news articles effectively.